


Mimicry

by grayglube



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergent, F/M, body horror of a kind, irreversible body swap, slight racial insensitivity, the seven wonders go wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-11 14:33:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11150406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: Failure has a price for those that try again.





	Mimicry

**Author's Note:**

> This is canon divergent, the one thing you might need an author's note to tell you before-hand is that the wonders go down differently, in this I have each girl go separately, the line-up as how they occur in this is Misty, Zoe, Queenie, and finally Madison. Written with pornbattle prompts in mind: Dead, comfort, overprotective, too close.

She's tired, rethinking things, weighing the possibilities and trying to make a plan for them. A plan for herself, too.

It's the heat, sticky and oppressive inside the small bathroom that’s making it so hard to think. She stares at the little round islands of her knees above the milky paleness of hot water and popped bath bubbles.

There’s too much to distract her. The hotel bathroom is all fog.

Kyle's behavior mirrors Madison's, violent towards anyone looking to take away the thing he likes most.

She wonders how long it will be before he starts to throw temper tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants.

'A great pair of guns,' ones a girl could really climb, she can hear Madison saying it still, repetitious in her mind ever since they picked out his parts. His arm always drapes itself around her, and his chest always presses into her shoulder blades when she stands in front of him. It's as stifling as the heat but not completely unwanted.

Sometimes, it's just a little too much and Madison always scowls when she looks at them.

She'd thought she'd decided on boundaries for herself but it's hard now that it's just them, without Madison it’s hard to keep up, bumping hips and rubbing legs as they walked across the bridge was easy but his tongue inside her mouth and his teeth around her orange slice, sucking juice off her gums made her body warm, made her happy.

But he's volatile and he stands back when she does any real magic and she thinks it might be fear and she wonders if he'll hate her for it one day soon. When it's quiet she thinks about everyone, on the bus, after walking away from the revived man in the park, now in the bathwater.

She wonders if that's it and she hopes it isn't.

She decides it isn't, that she'll have to go back, she just doesn't know when.

Maybe they'll come and get her, welcome her back, _beg_ her to come back. Maybe they'll burn her, instead.

It makes her tired to think about it all again. She slides down under the water and holds her breath, it seems like the lights go out and the bathtub is smaller suddenly, she wakes up with a sense that time has passed without an awareness of it. The lights are still on and the water is still warm.

She feels strange. Lonely.

When she catches herself with a hand against the closed door she doesn't understand how she got to it so quickly but there's water circling her feet making her toes cold against the tile but no damp footprint on her towel.

She puts a hand over her eyes and sees the school, blood and bodies and everyone dead.

She's dead, but she's not. She wonders if it's a possibility that she’s finally cracked up.

She decides to pretend that she's just tired, that everyone hasn't left a mark on her somehow. That tragedy and power and hate hadn't changed Nan so drastically, or turned Madison into a snake, or led Queenie astray, or maimed Cordelia, hadn't robbed Misty of trust and led Fiona to plot how best to kill them all for the sake of a couple extra decades of life.

Miserable, rotten, life, something says inside of her. Fiona is an oozing cancer. Black and fetid and foul.

Kyle is sitting across from the door, illuminated by a rectangular of dim bathroom light, he's smiling and then it melts back into his face while he stares.

It's not that she's forgotten she's naked, she's just forgotten about him being with her, about how much of a boy he is, despite the kisses that he steals from her mouth and his arm draped over her shoulders and bumping into him when they walk in step together and his hand notching itself into hers, he's a boy and he's staring at her and they haven't had sex since Madison decided it was the way to solve all their problems.

She steps from tile to hotel room rug to press up into him where he looms, she wants to climb him, swing off of his neck and shoulders but his arm sweeps around the back of her thighs and hefts her up so he doesn't have to bend to slot his mouth to hers, chase her tongue to tag it.

Her feet swish like she's swimming, toes rubbing against the hems of his jeans but not the floor and he takes two steps to the wall, reaching out a hand to keep her off of it so her head doesn't hit it hard.

He's careful with her, holds her tight so she doesn't slip.

She notices that there's a difference between that and possession, between that and trapping her with hands that could.

She lies her head back and lifts a knee, moves her hips and tries to hold them against him, he doesn't pull her thigh, but he holds it in his hand when she moves it and tries to thrust up against him like a bird beating its wings.

"Put me on the bed. I want us to be happy for a while."

"I make you happy?"

"You make me feel good, you know that?"

She pulls him down on top of her and works him out of his clothes, she doesn't want to miss how it feels when his skin presses to hers as clothes come away and are pushed to the floor.

"It's just us now."

She doesn't know how he means it, if he means forever or for the first time.

She can only be sure about them in the moments they exist in.

His mouth presses dampness like dots down her breasts and pants out over her navel, her legs open and lift, feet nudging his shoulders back so she can see his face and smile at him, he shakes his head and grins, grabbing a knee and tugging it over his back like a girl flipping her hair.

His tongue moves in long flat drags and she hums to the tapping of a tongue tip.

She rides him and after that he mounts her, later she slips her legs around his and slips him inside as easily as that and lazily he rolls into her with her spine a hot line down his front, a small breast in one big hand and a thigh pulled over in his other.

She sits in his lap, legs folded around his hips and his body using the mattress to bounce up further than where he's already so deep, bumping something that only allows so much give, each prod makes her breathe deeper.

He's inside of her. She thinks. Not just his dick. And she feels good.

Her womb feels bloated, swollen full because of him, her last orgasm comes gently late at night turning into pre-morning, thrumming thick like her heartbeat and her breasts stuck to his chest with sweat, his hands clasp tight to sticky scapula.

Her mouth plants itself lushly on his throat, she tells him that she loves him and he comes inside of her again.

Sweat and sex dry cool and tacky like the caul on a newborn left in a room to die.

A new supreme is born, she thinks.

She stretches and feels like she's slept for years when the sun rises.

* * *

 

They must each perform the Seven Wonders. One by one and one at a time.

Misty fails hers, dissolves into dust.

_"Ashes to ashes."_

And then with little more fanfare than sweeping the floor, it’s her turn.

She goes down into Hell herself but comes back to die.

Her body is gone and she feels it like a tether being cut to her only life, her short, little, life gone too much unlived because of too many unwanted gifts.

Like Kyle and Madison she finds herself cold and in the dark. Unlike them she knows, from the books she's spent so much time studying and the feeling in her feet that if she moves and walks that eventually she'll find her way out, it's just the dark. The fear of there being something in it is what kept them from moving, but there's nothing in the blackness of death. Until there is.

Then it's light, bright and white and she's not afraid, but she is forced to wait.

Madison isn't the supreme.

Zoe knows that too.

She can wait in the dark for the girl she called her friend sometimes, and leave her there, alone, forever, cold and afraid in the dark while she walks away to something else.

Zoe knows she should have walked further into the dark instead of out of it, death doesn't let go easily and it leaves marks on her that won't fade.

Still, after everything falls away, into so many pieces, it's been her choice.

Her litany is one word, rage and disbelief and the nauseous overwhelming regret, "no, no, no, no, no…"

She felt herself die, a tether being cut. Not just her spirit leaving for someplace lonely and quiet but her body dissolving into ash.

Like Misty, ashes to ashes. But she’d kept walking and there’s such a things as the conservation of energy leaving something behind but it's ill-fitting and awful and not hers, "no, no, no, no, no…"

* * *

 

She's alive.

But there's a price.

Phone calls from people she doesn't know asking if the news is true, asking her about who she wants to interview for first about the rumors of being a _witch_ , if she's been bamboozled by some modern cult of neo-pagan origin, if she's going to make sobriety last more than a couple of months.

She tells them Madison Montgomery is retiring from film. No interviews. Contract cancelled.

Queenie who failed to bring her back during her trials does her the favor of running to the drug store and picking up some things.

The drastic inky bob and bangs make her look entirely like someone else, she can't be Zoe anymore but she's not going to be Madison either.

There are dark smears on her white pillowcase in the morning when someone knocking drags her out of bed and to the door.

"No one will recognize you now, girl." Queenie says, cautiously.

"That's the point."

"Looks good."

"What's going on?"

"Breakfast."

Kyle wheels it in, sneaking glances at her when she looks the other way, she'll catch only the movement of his head turning in the other direction, their eyes don't meet, she's not trying to anyway. She doesn't know if it's the same for him.

"It will be busy soon, very busy. Phone calls are coming in, emails, reporters."

Queenie breaks open the unsure-of-where-to-start silence first. "So, what's happens now?"

Cordelia smiles at her. "We get ready."

Zoe pushes food around on her plate, contemplates the breakfast sausage she's pinioned under the prongs of her fork. "You shouldn't have done it like this," she grumbles at the plate, surly.

It's obvious in the wake of it being done, obvious why it's a bad idea except suddenly having a new supreme has added a layer of new wool over everyone’s eyes.

"Girl," Queenie starts, pointing with her utensil, "why you gotta act like that?"

Cordelia waves a hand, "No, that's why I have you girls."

"So, we should just stay hidden?"

Zoe can feel Queenie's tension, suddenly she knows Queenie is thinking she choose the wrong side to go back to.

"Just because Fiona was a shit supreme doesn't mean she was wrong about it being safer to keep up a buffer."

"You mean segregation?" Queenie says the words with a healthy dose of ironic flavor.

"We're legitimized now, but so are witch hunters, except now they'll have more recruits."

Cordelia pushes away her plate, Zoe takes a bite of food, waits until Cordelia has something to say before she looks up at her again.

"So what do we do, Zoe?"

Queenie laughs lightly, "We cast a magic spell to make the muggles forget."

Zoe shrugs with one shoulder and puts down her fork, "Why not?"

Queenie's head turns fast, her expression incredulous. "What?"

"I said, 'why not'."

"Because it's impossible."

"No, it's not."

Cordelia asks if she has an idea.

She does. "Mass influence."

Cordelia's face adopts an expression Zoe's only seen on Fiona, wariness as she asks: "Where did you find that idea?" Zoe doesn't let the scrutiny bother her.

"Books, when I was getting ready for the wonders."

Queenie harrumphs. "Subliminal messaging."

With a sigh she's gotten used to, one that now seems out of place on her new face Zoe looks at everyone at the table, Myrtle too, who sits quiet and unobtrusive. "Not really. Great orators of Rome and social reformists in England have been proven members of old covens."

"But you won't be shouting to a crowd in a marketplace, Zoe. It's a good idea but…-"

"It works through indirect exposure, it's been proven." Zoe cuts her off.

"By who, _Hitler_?" Queenie snorts into her pancakes.

She finds herself growing more irritated with each of Queenie's interruptions. She scowls, "Gabriele D'Annunzio, In Italy. Socialist too, but laid the groundwork for a fascist Italy and Mussolini.

"Who?"

Myrtle speaks for the first time, across the table, "They called him the ‘demon rake’. One of the great seducers of our time. It was in the eyes, apparently."

"He started off as a journalist from the middle class, no connections in high society, no real influence. He wasn't particularly attractive but women loved him and he ended up marrying a Duke's daughter. He wrote poetry and entertained high society woman, started writing novels and collections, became famous for that first. In World War One he joined the army with no experience and at the end of the war he was Italy's most well-known war hero. He ruled an entire city for over a year before the Italian government bombed him out. He seduced an entire country of people. Magnetism, mass influence, whatever you want to call it, is possible."

"They didn't have television in Italy in eighteen whatever." Queenie points out.

"Nineteen-nineteen. And, e didn't need television he did it through newspapers first in tiny page-six paragraphs and then with books, and then balcony addresses. It works in any medium. In fact, it actual seems to work better when indirect. But, I'll need help. A witch whose skills are with words, speech."

She looks at Myrtle who only says: "I am resigned to the judgment of our supreme."

"Zoe," Even the way Cordelia says her name now is careful, as if she's afraid it isn't really her, as if her face now is who she really is. "I don't see what good it will do to go after imaginary threats."

"It's a preemptive strike and it is _not_ imaginary. I'll do whatever you'd like me to do, but maybe we should postpone the barbeque until we can prove no one is going to burn us all now that they know where we are."

"Queenie?"

"I'd rather wait than burn you in case we need her help, unless you mind." Queenie looks at Myrtle who is statue still in her seat.

Cordelia looks at Myrtle for her own answer. "It is a Supreme's prerogative."

"Then it's postponed. For a month. And in that time Myrtle will teach you what you need to know in case anything should happen down the line."

* * *

 

Nothing fits her anymore, not any of her old clothes, wearing Madison's feels degrading. She wants to hide her skin in long sleeves and full pantyhose. Queenie watches her from the bed as she discards clothes from their hangers and leaves them in a pile growing garment by garment in a rhythm that mimics breathing.

"How the hell are you going to get on TV?"

"I'm a movie star, remember?"

"And what exactly you going to say?"

"Magic words."

She has them written down. Lines to learn by heart for the late shows and the late late shows, music shows where she host a top ten list, talk shows with middle aged women in pantsuits, fashion critics spewing vitriol on the audacity of someone's choice of metallic during the Fall season.

Queenie looks unimpressed by the answer. "And that's it then?"

"No. It's probably going to hurt, a lot. Trying to do something this big."

"This shit's safe right?"

On the other girl's face there seems to be concern that’s suddenly present as things start to happen, steps taken, spells, and magic words.

Cordelia is going to say ‘yes’. A witch was killed. Slaughtered like a farm animal. Limbs scattered and burned. Reflexively she rubs the scar on her own throat, she's been working on a glamour for it so when she makes her appearance no one speculates wildly.

"It might work, it might not, it might work and kill me, it might not work and kill me. We won't know until it's done."

"Why are you really doing this?"

"I want us to survive."

"We are surviving."

Except they aren't, she isn't, Queenie isn't, the girls they haven't found yet aren't, they are cowering and waiting for someone to lash out at them. “I didn't come back to get slaughtered. Whether it's tomorrow or in ten years when everyone starts to think we're a menace.”

"We aren't a menace."

She kicks her way past scattered fabrics, sequined dresses, lace halters and vegan leather pants, she sits on the opposite bed. "We're different, we're stronger than everyone else but there's a lot less of us than everyone else. They're going to ask for favors and help and when they decide we don't do enough or we decide to not help they'll kill us. Or, they'll try to keep us as pets. One in every household. Maybe it’d be like slavery."

Queenie’s face looks like she’s tasted sour milk. "You sound like Madison."

Madison at least was pragmatic, sometimes when the rage and pettiness was at its coolest temperature. The comparison still hurts her, not as deeply as it would have a month ago but it's still like a bruise that hasn't faded.

"I could have just left her, like she left me, but I didn't. I showed her the way out, peace and everything she didn't deserve. But, it was close, forty nine percent low-road and fifty one percent high-road, not half of me but close enough wanted to leave her where she was."

"She let you die. I would have left her."

She makes a sound but doesn’t answer and Queenie sits back down and watches her from across the room.

She picks a black dress from the closet, bell sleeved and flared at the hem and starts to dress herself, "Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it?" She belts the dress tight and starts to pull stockings over her feet, shimmy them up her calves and thighs and slips on high heels.

"Half of them is still more than all of us. Enough of them take the low road and it's all just fire pretty soon, and then we're dead and what's the fucking point?"

She has a plane to catch.

She leaves Queenie behind and meets Cordelia in the sitting room.

"You were right."

Zoe does not nod or grin. "That's not a good thing."

Cordelia stands at the window, far away, and looking haggard. "It's sad. I thought it was finally our time, out in the light."

"With a bunch of teenage girls with no self-control and no reason to want to behave?"

"I want you to go and find girls. I want you to bring them here. After you get back."

She can only agree, not feeling one way or the other about the announcement. Her life is in flux and she won't be able to decide how she feels until things settle again, if they ever do again. "Alright."

Cordelia looks tired and worried when she turns from the window, white curtains swaying closed. "I thought it would be better for you, that you'd like it."

"I do."

The new supreme smiles, small and soft and sad. "Good."

* * *

 

There is an aftermath to her solution, her spell, unexpected in a way that should relieve her but it only allows for quiet discomfort to settle into her stomach.

Kyle is not a witch, the whole house of them had crowded around the television to watch her be interviewed on the talk show circuit. He managed to be in the room, caught the tail end of it along with her ancient verbalizations with a modern twist to help undo the witch-hunts that would have begun again.

She's been away, finding girls. On trains, planes, driving late at night in zippy little rentals, finally she comes home with a pair of girls, the last on the list Cordelia had given her.

Kyle opens the door, carries the bags, leads them into Cordelia.

She expects words, at least a few. There is nothing and when he announces her as Madison Montgomery she knows it's because that's who he's been led to believe she is, that's the name she's been interviewed as, the girl, the woman she's had to pretend to be for the two and a half years.

He says he's seen her on television and her smile is brittle.

They make plans, the three of them. Her, Cordelia and Queenie. They start building a dorm, converting the school. Queenie will stay at Robichaux's and Zoe, Cordelia tells them, is going to be their dorm matron.

Kyle will go to.

* * *

 

"I remember you. A little." He says from behind her, carrying her bag as she goes about choosing which room she’ll take as hers.

"What do you mean?"

"Your hair was different."

"It used to be."

He sets her bag down on the long stool at the foot of the bed, he doesn't leave. She puts her other down on the floor and opens the windows to let in some air.

"Something bad happened to you."

"Sure." She nods, uncomfortable being around him, they’re strangers now. “But bad things happen to everyone, you know."

"Before all this, I meant."

She can't remember anything except Charlie for a moment, she wonders if that's what he means before he continues, wonders how on earth he would know.

"It was at a party."

Of course, she closes her eyes. "That wasn't me."

He looks confused, deciding something. He thinks she's lying, as Madison, trying to forget what happened. He's perceptive. But she isn't Madison so things are terribly confused between them.

"There was a girl named Zoe, she was there too."

"There was." She waits for something from him, recognition. Nothing comes.

"There are other things."

"Like what?"

"You died. And they brought you back and before the other witch fixed me I fucked you."

"…"

"I'm sorry I did that." He does look sorry.

"It's alright." It’s not. Nothing is alright.

"I don't remember everything."

"…"

She unpacks, he stands in the room, handing her clothes, folds them neatly before she places them into drawers. She doesn't like it, doesn't like his sudden proximity, his observations.

Things have changed and she's been gone and progress has been made, he could unravel everything she's done to try and ignore that they have a past.

That he had a life before.

"Why does everyone call you Zee?"

"Because they don't really know what else to call me now. A lot of things have happened."

"So, who are you?"

His tone gains force, she pretends it's nothing but casual conversation even when his hands clench into fists.

"I don't know what you mean."

There is a long moment, the shirt he's handing her not let go of his grasp, she pulls until it is clear he wants her to look at him.

"Are you Zoe, or are you Madison, or are you both?"

She lets her grip go slack, the shirt falls on the floor, and neither of them move to pick it up. "What do you think?"

"I don't think you're either of them anymore."

"…"

She watches his bow down and pick up the fallen garment, a white silk blouse of high cost, a gift from an old friend that she never made herself, someone she had to pretend to remember. He holds it out to her. "But I don't think that's a bad thing,” he says.

She thinks that they’re done until he goes on. "You put a spell on me."

The drawer slams shut, her powers spiking in surprise. "Just a charm against dark influence."

"To keep me loyal?" There's no real accusation in his voice, just curiosity.

"Not to me."

"To the house."

"…what?"

"To the house."

"That's not why I did it. You're the only man in this house, some witches have entitlement issues."

"Like you and her did?" His smile is vicious, mean, and cruel, this time his tone is sweet but his face is a judgment of everything she's ever done to him or for him or because of him and it's a judgment that finds her wanting.

The implication offends her considering how things changed the moment she came back.

"I can take it off if that's what you want."

"I'm not a slave."

"Without it someone might make you one."

He considers her words, turns them over, says nothing else as he leaves the room. The door swings shut, she sits on the edge of the bed and smokes silently, mind empty.

Stasis and change, things have settled now. For now.

* * *

 

She channels Fiona one night, utterly in charge, a cool sense of condescending authority. Three girls playing with magic like it's some simple game, Junior Monopoly or Candyland.

She is not pleased.

Kyle is in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, doing dishes, long fingers flicking water after he pulls out the drain. The chocking suck of the sink is loud in the relative white noise of night.

She's disheveled in a nightgown and half-tied robe. She'd been asleep and felt something stirring, magic, greedy and barely controlled. It's strange how her body is attuned to it now. She knows when a witch passes her on the street, anonymous and not knowing herself sometimes.

Sometimes she feels things, impressions and emotions and the whispers of memory that aren't recorded on her past.

Cordelia has told her it's a sense of empathy, enhanced by being off the mortal coil, her own powers blending with the ones Madison's body remember. Her telekinesis is stronger, almost boundless, her pyromancy a touch more impressive but not as precise, her divination is shoddy, her influence over others is subtle, a cup of coffee brought to her by a girl who was in the kitchen next to the pot, or strangers moving out of her path even though they could not have seem her coming. She doesn't transmute, can't maybe, it's not really an inconvenience.

She hasn't had sex in four years and she's standing alone with the only person alive who's given her an orgasm before, who’s felt her inside, who she’s let cum inside, who’s told her they love her.

It's late and she's lonely, she's in a house surrounded by so much uncontrolled magic it sticks on her skin and seeps inside to her bones and blood and she wakes up sometimes, alert, renewed, a live wire pulsing steadily, aware of everything, everyone asleep, and becomes aware of the fact that between her legs she's swollen and ready to be fucked.

The mornings after those nights she finds everything irritating and every nerve raw, she loses her temper, has less patience for failure or misbehavior than Fiona ever did on her worst days.

The nights are the worst, she can't sleep and her need, awful and unrelenting, goes unsatisfied.

Kyle sways where he stands and catches himself on the countertop. She barely notices that he's there, lost in her own contemplations, until he's got an arm around her waist and behind her knee to carry her to the table, she feels his erection pressing into her thigh from under his slacks.

He's kissing her and pushing up her nightgown and undoing his belt and parting her thighs, hands molding her breasts, thumb circling her nipple, teeth on her throat. She can't breathe, suddenly caught up and she hitches up a leg and shoves her foot against his stomach to push him away, holds out a hand when he lurches back at her, her other working to secure the hem of her nightgown over her knees.

"Stop."

She can't look up at him, can't see him now.

Her hand curls into a fist so tight her arm shakes and clenches her jaw so tight it hurts, too much magic in the house at night, and she's a magnet, the only witch who can handle it the way it wants to be handled.

Glassware explodes and she stifles a rough sound in her throat, he pulls himself back into his pants, backs up a step and goes to clean up the mess.

"Leave it!"

He stops and turns slowly, two in a half years have made his shoulders wider and added muscle to his body that wasn't there before, she can't look at him, it's already too much but if she looks at him she'll let him fuck her, put it in his head to do it, and it won't be an accidentally stray thought.

And she won't do that.

But she wants to and he's grabbing her knees again, shoving himself between them, she kicks at the backs of his thighs and in desperation for sudden escape pictures her solitary room upstairs.

The sudden movement from one place to the next makes her nauseous, her calf hits into the bedside table so hard upon transmuting that the skin splits like a too ripe peach dropping from a tree. She makes a loud sound of irritation and anger and stitches it in the florescent light of her bathroom, nightgown blotched with red and calf screaming in discomfort, her sex throbs and there's a mark on her collar left behind from the rough suction of his mouth.

In the kitchen someone is breaking the plates.

She feels the same, breaking apart under her own fingertips.

* * *

 

She's showered and dressed, ready to make her way over to Robichaux's.

He's got a basket of laundry on his arm.

He stops walking and she stops fixing the way her watch sits on her wrist to stare back.

"I'm sorry about what happened."

"Why?"

"I shouldn't be here, I'm not used to being around so many other witches."

"What does that have to do with it?"

"Being here is harder than I thought."

"Are you leaving?"

She doesn’t have an answer that will satisfy either of one.

* * *

She thinks about the start of it all, again, for the hundredth, thousandth time.

Madison burned her body. Petty revenge for things that she was never the cause of and went down into hell. It was the one wonder she wasn't ready for , a room in a sorority house, and Zoe found her there as history repeated and boys in blue polos were taking turns.

And then in a moment there were no boys with greedy hands and mean hearts, it was only them. She didn’t leave Madison in the room or in the dark, not that Madison wanted to go anywhere other than back.

Neither of them has any real choice.

She remembers waking up, her legs cold in thin stockings and a short dress, scanty underwear cutting into her hips with lace, heels she can't stand on, everyone around her in the dark room, the hourglass is run down and candles flare, Cordelia grabbed her and said that they thought they lost her, Myrtle kept looking at the hourglass that should have been counting down to Madison's doom, she’d looked disappointed. Queenie's chest had risen with a heavy laugh and a sneer.

'No' was the only word she could think to say.

They understood, almost immediately, a succinct 'oh, shit' from Queenie and Myrtle commending her fine revival, Cordelia touching her face and finding things that made her herself and not Madison.

She sat by where her body had been, whole and waiting out in the greenhouse. It wasn’t anymore. It had smelt awful, like burnt hair, there'd been a sheet over it and she’d felt an abject disconnect, alone again in a world she didn't understand or see enough of. She’d kept them out. Doors slammed shut and windows shuttered.

The greenhouse now is quiet and balmy and she looks at Cordelia's carefully grown potted row of poisonous plants. There is no burnt body. There is nothing but her.

She picks off a leaf and touches it to her mouth, her lips go numb.

Something breaks on the cement. An already broken pane as someone tries to push open the door, her distraction makes it easy for her rage to settle.

It’s one of the girls. "It's time for dinner."

Kyle had found her when she’d been looking at her body and the way he’d looked at her was awful, like he’d been trying to keep something down.

She nods and follows, sees herself in cloudy broken glass, morphed strangely on the shiny metal of the refrigerator, in the mirror in the hall, except she's not herself.

* * *

 

She doesn't leave. The nights are the worst. Something in her left unchecked while she sleeps. He climbs the stairs every night, called.

The knocking wakes her, if there's a knock. There isn't one some nights, there’s just him at the foot of her bed waiting.

"I'm sorry. Please go, Kyle."

He doesn't leave, outside her door he breathes and knocks again.

"Open the door."

"No. I can't." She presses her forehead to the door and sighs in relief when the floor whines outside the door and he walks away, down the hall.

The door in the connecting bathroom opens and when she turns he's there, in the other doorway, black with the nightlight on behind him, she arches with a turn into the door at her back, laughs lightly to herself. "Why would you do that?" Her fingers pulling up the hem of her nightgown as she says it, but it sounds less like pleading for him to leave than invitation to come closer.

She thinks for a moment it might be him, the empathy instilled, his own needs playing to hers.

He shrugs, coming closer, not softly but casually. "Because I wanted to."

She can almost believe it.

"No, because I wanted you to."

But she can't. Not empathy or sympathy, just influence, the part left over from Madison, dark and sticky, blended with her own brand of blurred boundaries.

She wants him to lift her up and move clothes out of the way. He smirks. "The road goes both ways," he says.

His cheek is rough against hers and his mouth is hot.

"Some are just dead ends.”

He pulls her nightgown off her shoulders and she helps.

"You want me."

"Stop."

"Make me."

"Don't."

It's only a token argument with her her guiding him and his dick closer. She knocks his hands away so he doesn't have to fumble, she's well practiced with finding herself in the dark.

"Did I fuck you like this or was it her?" He asks while he's inside of her, hips knocking against hers, her bare shoulders scraping against the wall, she can break off words with effort. "It was her."

"I'm sorry." He looks at her, he looks like he means it, she clutches his shoulders, nails rasping across the back of his neck and admits that she wanted it to be her.

He pushes further, with a hungry grin.

* * *

 

There is a desk between then, a small amount of space, still there's a bigger one that's been between them since the threads connecting them were cut by Cordelia's supremacy and her growing up.

"I can't be there," she says.

Cordelia nods. "I understand."

"I'm going out. I'll be back."

"Do what you need to do. Just, be careful." Cordelia watches her go.

She comes back after a month. He waits.

She comes back. He waited.

* * *

 

"I love you."

"You don't even remember who I really am."

"So? I love you."

"Don't be stupid."

"You don't believe me?"

"…"

She does, he knows.

"You brought me back so I'm yours."

**Author's Note:**

> Gabriele D'Annunzio is a real dude, kinda fun to play with historical people and find ones who would be cool witches.


End file.
